A collection of thoughts, essays, opinion and nonsense from a former morning show host with way too much time on his hands.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Will You Still Read Me, Will You Still Need Me, by Post 64

I took a couple of days away from posting because it started to feel like an obligation. Not an obligation to anyone who may be reading this, but an obligation to myself. If it was a weekday, I must post. But over the last couple of days, I've had nothing to say. I've been happy, and happiness generally leads to banality. I've always maintained that a happy artist (musician, poet, writer, actor) is a doomed artist. Creativity and inspiration is drawn out more by insecurity and unhappiness. Using a couple of country music start as examples, Clint Black's career hit the skids as soon as he met and married Lisa Hartman. Chart success and radio airplay dried up. The songs reflected Clint's attitude at the time, which went from insecurity to an overwhelming happiness and his sales suffered. He's never recovered.

One more example: Tim McGraw. For whatever reason, he continues to be increasingly popular in spite of the fact that each subsequent song that he releases is worse than the last. I can't correlate a direct connection between his fall artistically and his relationship to Faith Hill (whose stardom has always escaped me), but I can't think of anyone whose popularity has grown inversely to the quality of the product as much as McGraw. He's like an audio version of Redbook magazine. The fact that he was recently their cover boy was no accident.

So anyway, me not posting for posting's sake the last couple of days was more of a case of me not being inspired to write than anything else. My elevated mood made most of the ridiculous things that I heard and read about seem unimportant. I can't explain the good mood lately. It's usually coffee relayed, but with the new job, I'm only drinking 1-2 cups a day as opposed to my old amount of a pot and a half. So it's not due to caffeine. I wish I could just be happy being happy instead of trying to find the underlying reason for it.

Quickie: They're changed up certain things about the KDWN morning news show and it's got me itching. It's actually a little easier for me, as my updates have gone from every six minutes to every ten minutes ("on the 7's!"). It's no longer a dry, professional news/weather/traffic/sports broadcast. It's now more the audio equivalent of a potluck breakfast. Some people might like this part, some people might like that part, some people might like the other part- but no one will like the whole thing. I may be wrong, but I think the change was brought upon by the recommendation of the station consultant. I feel radio consultants are comparable to hit and run drivers. They cause sometimes irreparable damage, yet get away from having any responsibility for it. Whatever the reason, I guess when you're 18th in morning drive, you take whatever chances you can get.

If good radio is simple in concept, why is it almost impossible in practice?